The Last Place You Look

by Kristen Lepionka

  “You look like you had fun last night,” my brother said, stirring sugar into his coffee. Andrew, somehow, never got hungover, like the way some people don’t get poison ivy or ice-cream headaches. It wasn’t fair. “Spill.”

  I waved him off. Catherine Walsh was on the no-fly list in terms of conversation topics, and my late-night visit from Cass and Damon would only make him worry about me. Besides, that hardly counted as fun. I was fine, I told myself. Everything was fine. “Just working,” I said. “You know I never have fun anymore.”

  “How’s that going, your case for Matt’s lady friend?” he said. Then his eyes widened as he remembered something. “I meant to tell you: Did you know he’s in a band?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “No,” I said.

  “They’re called the Test Pavements,” Andrew said.

  I had to laugh. “What does that even mean?” I said.

  He shook his head. “A construction workers’ joke, I assume,” he said, “it sounds like a bunch of ODOT guys playing REM covers. He told us about it on Wednesday night after you left. He has a gig at some shitty coffee shop in Hilliard this Friday and Mom said we’re all going.”

  I squeezed the liquid out of my tea bag. “That sounds awful,” I said. “A coffee shop? Will there be alcohol, at least?”

  “No. Believe me, I asked. He said they have a wholesome juice bar, though.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I think I should be exempt. I wasn’t there when the plan was discussed, and he clearly waited till after I left to bring it up for a reason.”

  “Nice try. You’re going.”

  “A Friday night out with our mother? All this togetherness. I don’t know if I can take it.”

  “I know,” Andrew said. “It kind of makes you miss the benign neglect of our childhood, doesn’t it?”

  We looked at each other for a beat. Finally, I said, “You owe me seven hundred bucks. Or half that, anyway. The sink?”

  “What?” Andrew said. “When did this happen? And how does replacing a sink cost that much?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but that’s what it cost. I was over there when the plumber finished and someone had to pay him.”

  “Shit, Rox,” Andrew said. “Sorry. Wait—half? What about Matt?”

  “I talked to him,” I said. “He was unmoved. Also, I hung up on him. Hey, did you know that Mom hasn’t been inside the office since it happened?”

  “How did that come up?” my brother said, ignoring my abrupt change of subject.

  “I asked her about what she did with his old notebooks,” I said. “And she said they were probably still in the office but she didn’t know what was in there because it was locked. But, it’s not locked anymore.”

  Andrew sighed. “So what’s in there?”

  “Mostly dust,” I said, “but also the good liquor.”

  That got his attention. “How good is good?”

  “Midleton,” I said. “Wild Geese.”

  “Nice.”

  “And the computer in there, I swear it’s the same one they had when I was in high school,” I said. Then I thought of something else. “If Mom doesn’t have the key to the office, how does she e-mail us so often?”

  “I think she goes to the library.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Honestly,” he said, “I think that’s what she’s always done.”

  We both fell silent for a while.

  Finally, Andrew spoke again. “I’ll get together some cash for you this week. But are you okay? Moneywise?”

  “Moneywise, yeah,” I said.

  “What about otherwise?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my case is a mess. I don’t know how to help. Or even if anyone can. And I found a weird link back to Frank and I can’t stop thinking about it. Hence the notebooks.”

  My brother’s eyebrows went up. “What kind of link?”

  “Just a case he worked forever ago. It might have nothing to do with Matt’s friend at all, and I’m just making it into something because, well, because I’m me and this is what I do.”

  “No,” Andrew said, “you don’t make something out of nothing. That’s like the opposite of you.” He smiled. “You’ll figure it out.”

  Would I?

  I shoved half of the blueberry hand pie into my mouth and chewed as dramatically as possible so he couldn’t ask me any more questions.

  * * *

  The bureaucracy machine of the Chillicothe Correctional Institution moved a little faster since I’d already been there once. My name was called after forty minutes, and this time when Brad Stockton shuffled down to the Plexiglas booth where I was sitting, he looked flat-out shocked. “You’re back,” he said into the phone.

  “I am. I have a few more questions for you.” I wanted to say Please please please tell me you didn’t know Mallory Evans at all but I figured this wasn’t a good way to get to the truth, whatever it happened to be.

  Brad shrugged. “Okay, go for it.”

  I smiled at him. I felt like a liar—but then again, he might very well be a liar too. “I wanted to ask you about someone else you went to school with,” I said while I studied him, trying to decide if he seemed evil. “Mallory Evans.”

  For a beat it looked like he couldn’t place the name. Then his eyebrows knit together. “Really,” he said. “Why do you want to know about that?”

  “I’m looking into other crimes near Belmont. Her name came up.”

  He thought about that for a second. His face was unreadable. “Okay. Mallory. Yeah.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Sure, I knew her from school, but we weren’t friends or anything.”

  “Did you hear anything about what happened after she went missing?”

  Brad scratched his jaw. “Well, she dropped out junior year,” he said. “I didn’t even know she was ‘missing.’” He put air quotes around the word. “But then when they, like, found her, people started saying all kinds of crazy things, trying to guess who she went there with.”

  “Went where?”

  “To Clover Point.”

  I waited, not sure what he was talking about.

  “People used to go up there to fool around, you know, like a make-out spot.”

  “And where’s Clover Point?”

  He raised his eyebrows again, like he hadn’t intended to tell me something I didn’t already know. “She was found in the woods, right, in this ravine? Well, above the ravine, there’s a place to pull in. It used to be where you’d go, to fool around with your girl in the car because it was real quiet. No one ever went up there unless it was, you know, for that.”

  “Really.”

  “But then, after Mallory, the city put up signs that it was only open during daylight, so that kind of put a stop to it.”

  “Did you ever go there?”

  “No,” he said, going a little shifty-eyed.

  “Not even with Sarah?” I said. “Are you sure?”

  “Okay, maybe a few times, but mostly we just went to my house. Why are you asking about this, what’s it got to do with anything?”

  I took a deep breath, ignoring the question. “So after Mallory died, your classmates were trying to guess who she might have gone to the overlook with,” I said. It was a simplistic view of the crime, assuming that she had been killed there—the tarp and the bungee cords said otherwise, but I wanted to hear what he had to say about it. “What was the general consensus?”

  He shook his head. “It was just talk,” he said. “No one knew anything. Like I said, she dropped out and that was last I ever saw of her.”

  “But the police talked to you, right?” I guessed.

  His jaw bunched a little. “Yeah, the guy was a real asshole. Even by cop standards, you know? I’d been in some trouble earlier that year, so I guess I was on the watch list or whatever. But I mean, there used to be like four black families in Belmont. I was always getting the third degree for
something.”

  I decided not to mention that the real asshole was my father. “What were you in trouble for,” I said, “that got people on your case?”

  His expression hardened. “It was just a stupid prank.”

  “A prank.”

  “I got suspended for a few days,” he said. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “Why’d you get suspended?” I said, like I didn’t already know.

  “It was stupid. I wrote something about a teacher, a poem. It got around, and she didn’t like it. The end.” He looked at me, defiant. He wasn’t going to tell me any more about that.

  “I heard something about slicing up a teacher’s car seats,” I said. I assumed it was true since I heard it from two different people. “Was that her?”

  Brad shot forward in his seat, stabbing a finger in my direction. Without meaning to, I slid my chair back a few inches. “Why are you asking about this stuff?”

  His unreadable expression had turned distinctly readable. Now he looked like he wouldn’t mind stabbing me. “The car seats. Did you do that?”

  “Yeah, but it was nothing. Like I said, a prank.”

  It didn’t sound like a prank to me. “The police questioned you after Mallory Evans died,” I said, “they didn’t do that because of a prank.”

  “They questioned everybody.”

  I thought about what Derrow had said. Parents would lose their minds if the police questioned everyone in the school. “No, they didn’t, Brad.”

  “Why the fuck are you really asking about this stuff?”

  “I’m trying to get the whole story. To figure out if what happened to Mallory is somehow tied to what happened to Sarah. I need the truth, Brad. The other day you told me you never had a knife.”

  “You got the whole story already,” he said. He shook his head and then, without warning, he stood up and slammed the phone down.

  “Brad,” I said, but he was already walking away.

  SIXTEEN

  It started to rain again on the way back toward the city, which suited my mood. It hadn’t been my intention to make Brad Stockton angry to the point that he refused to talk to me, but I had. Another job well done. I still didn’t understand him: he had seemed ready to give up the other day, to stop fighting. I wondered what it meant that he didn’t want to fight about Sarah anymore, but he did want to throw down on the matter of a teacher’s car seats. I didn’t need to understand him, but I’d at least been hoping for something to definitively rule out his involvement in Mallory’s death. Instead, he acted just like Kenny had, shutting down when he should have been opening up.

  I had the distinct feeling that once Brad talked to his sister, I would not be employed much longer.

  I headed to Belmont without much of a plan, hoping one would materialize. As I waited at the traffic light on the exit ramp I glared out at the grey landscape. Wildflower Capital of Ohio, the sign reminded me. But then I noticed another sign on the same pole, a brown one with an arrow informing me that the Clover Point Scenic Overlook was two miles away. The place where Mallory’s body had been found. A morbid curiosity took hold of me. I wanted to see the place.

  I drove east on Clover Road, past Taverna Athena, the place where Sarah Cook’s house once stood, and past Kenny Brayfield’s street, finally spotting another sign that directed me to turn left. The road got suddenly narrower, plastered in slick orange-brown leaves, no edge lines. Up ahead, a slight incline and a rusting guardrail. I slowed down as I drove up the hill and finally found Clover Point, which was nothing more than a gravel rectangle with space for half a dozen cars and a wooden platform perched on the side of the hill and facing the trees. There was no one else up here.

  I felt around in my backseat for a Columbia rain jacket and transferred my keys and phone—which was mercifully quiet so far today—to its pockets. Then, after looking at the murky dark below, I got my revolver out of the glove box. I pulled the hood of the rain jacket over my head and stepped onto the wooden platform, grabbing on to the railing, briefly disoriented from the height. It was nearly a hundred feet of sloping, leaf-covered ground to the bottom of the ravine. I saw now that there was a set of steps leading down to the ravine from the platform I stood on. A few dozen yards away, a chain-link fence separated the woods from an access road like the one I’d taken to get here, and a cluster of orange barrels and construction equipment stood behind it.

  I started carefully down the steps. They were slippery from rain and mud and leaves. Although the area was quiet now, evidence of assorted vices littered the ground: food wrappers, crushed beer cans, a condom caught on branches below a small plank bridge that spanned a dried-up creek. Why had Brad said no, he’d never come here with Sarah, and then corrected himself a beat later? Why had he told me about this place but then seemed to regret it? Peter Novotny had said that innocent clients were often the least helpful, but Brad’s behavior had now crossed the line from unhelpful to something like suspicious.

  At the bottom of the steps, a frayed nylon rope was tied between the hand railings, a small sign advising No Access. I hopped over it, put my hands in my pockets, and walked through the dense thicket of trees to the fence, through which I could see the source of the construction equipment—an apartment complex was going up over there, one of those big, impersonal ones with names like The District. Two buildings were done and appeared occupied, and two others were in various stages of completion.

  I walked along the fence for a while. I didn’t like it down here, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something here for me to see besides just the place where Mallory Evans was found. The farther away from the overlook, the denser the woods got. The muddy ground was free of footprints and trash now, like no one was interested in trespassing this far in. Five or so minutes of walking and I couldn’t even see where my car was parked anymore. The rain provided a blanket of even sound, a white-noise machine.

  Maybe that was why I didn’t hear footsteps in the mud until they were right behind me.

  I spun around, my heart leaping into my throat. A few feet up the incline, a Belmont cop peered down at me from under the brim of his uniform hat. He was a slight black guy with glasses, which were spotted with rain. He wore a billowing clear plastic poncho that made him look like he was draped in a shower curtain liner.

  “Jesus Christ, you scared me,” I breathed, a hand over my chest.

  “Can I ask what you’re up to back here?” he said.

  “Can I ask why you snuck up on me?” I squinted in the low light at his name tag: R. Meeks.

  “Sorry.”

  “Yeah, I can tell,” I said.

  But he did look like he was a little sorry. He appeared to be about my age and completely miserable in his poncho. “Come on, let’s go.”

  “I thought it was Columbus city territory down here.”

  “Not anymore. Belmont annexed it a while back, and now it’s private property. Hence the no-access sign, which you must have tripped over since I’m sure you aren’t trespassing on purpose.”

  I smiled slightly. Now that my pulse was returning to normal, I put my hands back in my pockets. “The scenic overlook is private property?”

  “Recently sold,” Meeks said. “In nine months, all of this is going to be apartments. Now, if you don’t mind, let’s go on back up.”

  I wondered what I was supposed to do next.

  I wondered if the developers of the apartment complex knew that they were about to take over what had once been a young mother’s burial site.

  I wondered if it mattered.

  I looked at Meeks for a second. This was the fourth time I’d been intercepted by the Belmont police in as many visits to the area, and this time there wasn’t even anyone around to rat me out. “How did you know I was here?”

  Meeks nodded toward the steps but I didn’t budge. Finally, he said, “Your car. There’s a BOLO out for your car.”

  It wasn’t funny, but I laughed. “Great,” I said. “So now what?”


  “Now Chief Lassiter would like to speak with you.”

  “About my car?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.” Meeks huffed impatiently. “But it sounded urgent.”

  I shrugged and began to follow him back toward the overlook. “How did you find my car this time?” I said.

  “This time?” He glanced back at me, losing his footing a little on the rocks.

  “Every time I come down here, one of Belmont’s finest manages to find me. It’s just interesting.”

  “Well,” Meeks said, “I was driving by and saw your car parked up there. Every shift since Wednesday, we’ve been getting a little pep talk at roll call, about looking for you.”

  I stopped for a second as I contemplated that. The Belmont police were a bipolar bunch: they were hypervigilant to my presence even though I had literally done nothing except ask a few questions and sit in my car, and yet they also seemed to be terrible at preventing actual crime. “What is it that I’ve allegedly done?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing like that,” he said, like I should take comfort in the fact that no one had accused me of anything yet. “Belmont’s a close community, though. Outsiders are pretty obvious.”

  “I hope you realize how insane that sounds,” I said, and he looked over his shoulder and gave me a little smile.

  “I do. You’d be shocked at the things we get calls about on a regular basis. People are just cautious, is all. Not much happens down here, so a stranger in a vintage car sticks out like a sore thumb.”

  Not much happens down here. He apparently hadn’t grown up in Belmont.

  The air was almost a physical presence, a sheet of wet fabric. Climbing up the hill was harder than going down it had been, and I was breathing hard by the time we were halfway back to the overlook. Or I thought that was where we were, anyway. I was disoriented. The rain and the soft, sloping ground made me feel like we were in a snow globe. I glanced around us, uneasy. Leaves, fallen branches, rocks. In the fading afternoon light, the scene in front of me glowed orangish brown. I tried to picture the map from my father’s notebook and wondered where Mallory Evans had been found. I remembered a curving border from his sketch—the access road or the fence, probably the former since the latter looked newer than sixteen years old. Either way, the body was discovered inside of that line, buried ten inches below the ground, covered with rocks and leaves. I tried to take in the scene through my father’s eyes. I knew I only had a few minutes before we got back to the party spot below the overlook.